Simulation of pedestrian counter-flow with right-moving preference

People prefer to walk on the right-hand side of the road for physical and social reasons. In this paper, pedestrian counter-flow in a channel is simulated with the Cellular Automata (CA) Model, with focus on right-preference. Two types of pedestrians are taken into account, walking leftward and rightward along the channel. Circular and open boundaries are adopted respectively. The right-preference intensity, k, is introduced, defined as the ratio of the right-moving probability to left-moving probability. In simulations, the dynamical transition between fluid and jammed phase is presented. With a fixed k, the critical density is independent of the channel size. According to research results on physiology and sociology [O. Guentuerkuen, Nature 421 (2003) 711; M. Reiss, G. Reiss, Percept. Mot. Skill 85 (1997) 569; M.C. Corballis, Psychol. Rev. 104 (1997) 714], k=1,2,8 have been discussed, and k=8 is satisfied in this work. Furthermore, simulation results are compared with the ideal calculation, and other researchers’ experiments [M. Isobe, T. Adachi, T. Nagatani, Physica A 336 (2004) 638]. It is found that right-preference is effective when the density is below critical. The model is shown to be useful to simulate and analyze this situation numerically